Louisie Sue and Dave
Louisie Sue and Dave, (also known as LSD) is an early 42nd C. Electronica band from Kalistan. Known mostly for playing large shows with elaborate lighting arrays, they released 3 albums between 4100 and 4107, before Louisie Sue's tragic death due to a drug overdose and suicide. LSD headlined Kalistan's GanJam three times during their career. History Formation and Torrents (4100-4002) Louisie Sue met Dave in college in Kalistan. Both were interested in electronic music and decided to form a band as well as a deep friendship which would last the rest of Louisie's life. Dave played a sequencer and guitars, and Louisie Sue played an electronic keyboard and sang on all tracks. Both took turns writing songs, but all songs were credited to Louisie Sue and Dave. At first they envisioned themselves as an EDM band, but soon shifted to a more alt-electronica sound modified by acid rock. Said Dave, "Well, even early on, she was pretty much out of it most of the time, but we both knew who people came to see: It wasn't the bearded sequencer player. And anyway, she was very talented, so I went along with her, and it all turned out for the best. She liked that really strange music, and so when we did it, our fans loved it. And that's what we stuck with." The band recorded their freshman album in late-4100, called Torrents, and began a career playing mostly to underground audiences in and around Sulari and Yoshimi, Suldanor. The band had an interesting conceptual performance style: Their music was fairly complex, and utilized a sequencer to pre-record backing rhythm section that they played in a live show. But Louisie Sue's keyboard work was described as frantic, while she delivered her vocals in a mix between pleading and spitefulness. The lyrical content was usually a mystery. She described her voice as "another instrument", and the lyrics, when read often did not make sense. But fans showed up for the live show, which featured ubiquitous drug use, including in a 4101 show, the singer famously dosing herself with 35 doses of something, during the first song of the set, and playing the double set under the influence of whatever it was she took. In addition, the band developed a visual aesthetic which required the rear projection of images on a 2-dimensional screen that appeared to the crowd to be three dimensional. During most of the set, the band would play entirely backlit by these projected images, with the lights off, so they would appear as silhouettes. Finally, their set list in the early days was developed to start out quiet, and over the course of the show, become more frantic and bizarre, until the end, where the lights would come up and both musicians were covered in sweat, and on one occasion, Dave was covered in blood from wounds he had accidentally caused on his guitar strings. During near-constant touring, the band made a name for itself in the Alt-Electronic scene in Suldanor, and was poised to break out to national stardom. National Fame and Black Out (4102-4104) In mid-4102, the group headlined their first L Night at the GanJam, and then immediately went into the studio to record their second album. LSD actually recorded for only two and a half weeks, though post-production took three months. A lot of this was due to a habit Louisie had picked up during her touring days of whistling when she was not singing. The road sound crew was used to the habit by the end of their tour, and would dampen her mic when she was not supposed to be singing, but the studio engineer was not used to habit, and was under strict orders to keep recording no matter what happened. The producer, Pedro "Pete Rock" Guillermo, then working on the second record of his career, listened to the masters after the tracks were laid down and nearly quit the job on the spot. But Guillermo and Dave went back in and painstakingly stripped the whistling out, instead, transforming it into another instrument, that was layered in the background. It was a technique that Guillermo later named "Feedbacking" and turned into one of his signature sounds as he continued producing for others. Louisie's whistling, when produced in a certain way, sounded like guitar feedback, and the two producers worked it through a modulator, to make it fade in and out, like a wave, which traveled across the record. Many described it as like tinnitus that fans often got from listening to music too loud. The Album was considered an artistic masterpiece by critics and fans alike, and produced four Number 1 singles for the band, including "Felt in Love" and "Black Out". Before the record was completed, LSD went back on the road, and during on late-4102 Concert in Sulari, played the entire record live, with Dave working the "feedbacking" technique into the show by actually playing a lot of his guitar right in front of his monitor. Louisie Sue always said she loved the road, but her drug use began to take a toll on her. She would frequently slip into periods of quasi-psychosis, completely unsure of where she was or why she was there. After headlining the L-Night at the GanJam in late 4103, she was briefly injured by falling off a set riser, and breaking her ankle. While she was being taken to the hospital, she produced a knife from her pocket and attacked the paramedics. She stabbed one of them in the arm and another in the left buttock before the knife was wrestled from her hand. When she was released from the hospital, she was taken to a holding cell at the Sulari jail. In January 4104, Louisie Sue plead guilty to 3rd degree assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced by a Suldanor court to 3 months of rehabilitation, and restitution for the injuries she had caused. When she ended rehabilitation, she called Dave, and wanted to go on tour again. But by now, Dave realized that Louisie was harming herself, and only agreed to tour with her again if she stayed sober. Louisie agreed and the band toured Kalistan over the summer and fall of 4104. After the tour was over, LSD went on hiatus until the winter of 4106. ''Five/Thirds'' and the Death of Louisie Sue (4106-4107) In December 4106, LSD decided to record another album. This album, called "Five/Thirds" saw the band progress from "Black Out". They incorporated more trip-hop elements into the record, and even invited noted hip hop Artist Fatt Mann, who they had collaborated with on an unreleased EP in 4105, to join them on a track. "Five/Thirds" also played with tricky time signatures which Dave had begun working on during the hiatus, and at 1 hour and 15 minutes, is the band's longest album. LSD produced the record themselves, and even launched a production company with the aim of signing new artists. "Five/Thirds" received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Most positive were reviews for the continued evolution of the band's sound, but many critics called the record profoundly chaotic and disorganized. One critic even commented that she hated the "sober" Louisie Sue: In the particularly vicious review for a Kalistani teen magazine, author Doris Glendon said, "What this band needs is for Louisie to return to drugs, as quickly and enthusiastically as possible." Lousie Sue was reportedly devastated by that particular review. When the album was released in Spring of 4107, LSD began touring to support the record, but Dave knew something was terribly wrong. In an interview he gave after Louisie's death, he said, "I think Five/Thirds broke her spirit. She was doing so well with the drugs and everything, but the really cruel things that critics and so-called journalists said behind their paper walls, where they thought they were both safe and above us, they were the ones who did her in. She was a ghost when we went on tour in 07." Fans did not treat the band much better during the tour. Even when they played their old songs, which had been number 1s and crowd favorites, some fans booed them. On three occasions, Louisie Sue walked off the stage in tears, and ended the show early. These episodes just fueled speculation that Louisie Sue was unstable, and fan magazines shamelessly promoted such rumors. The Band played the 4107 GanJam in August 4107 to a mostly appreciative audience. They stuck largely to the set-list they developed during the tour for "Black Out". Sometime in September, Louisie Sue began using drugs again. On the night of September 19, Louisie's neighbors called the local police to report sounds of violence and destruction coming from Louisie's apartment. When the police arrived and attempted to force open the door, they were initially unsuccessful. Suddenly, the sounds ended, and witnesses heard a single gun shot. The police officers kicked in the door, and discovered Louisie Sue laying in her bathroom, mortally wounded by a single gunshot to her temple. She was still alive when the paramedics arrived, but not conscious. EMTs treated her immediately for shock, but she died on the way to the hospital. There had been evidence in her apartment of heavy heroin, cocaine, DMT and MDMA use, and all these drugs as well as barbiturates and alcohol were found in her blood during the autopsy. Her death was ruled a suicide by the coroner, and the cause of death was described as "Overdose-induced heart attack complicated by acute trauma to the brain." Legacy and Resurrection Dave retired from music with the death of Louisie Sue. "She was the love of my life," he said a few months after she died. "I mean, we were never romantically involved. But I just loved her to death, and I tried to support her as much as I could, to keep her healthy and clean. We just wanted to make music, and she was my soulmate, and now she is gone." Dave became a house painter soon afterward. In the early 4400's Louisie Sue and Dave began selling records once more, 300 years after they were recorded. As the RF movement kicked off in Kalistan, young fans rediscovered Louisie Sue and Dave, and developed almost a cult of personality around the earlier artists. Said one fan, "Yeah, you know, her music changed my life. She was so sensual, and so erotic, and so complicated and troubled, and just, like in touch with that essential part of life. Really a role model to look up to, you know." "Fifth/Thirds" was recently re-released, and received the critical acclaim that was denied it before the untimely death of Louisie Sue. Said one critic, "We journalists tore her apart before, and that's on us. But here is a tribute to the forward thinking viewpoint of these two wonderful artists, and you can tell that Louisie and Dave are in the pantheon right now looking down and smiling that finally people are listening to their music with ears that can hear what they are trying to say. A new Generation, perhaps one more worthy than their own, has embraced them and adopted them, and finally, they are among the greats where they belong." As of Late-4418, the reissue of "Fifth/Thirds" has outsold the original release of the record by fifteen times. Musical Style During the career of Louisie Sue and Dave, the band was considered one of the more important bands in Suldanor. Their electronic sound drew extensively from experimental and electronic genres that swirled throughout Kalistan at the time. They were frequently compared to more influential contemporaries like Angst Experience and Mariann Karlsson. Louisie Sue and Dave's music took a different tack, however: While much of the creativity in contemporary Neveras bands associated with trip-hop was drawn from the syntheses of different music sounds and experimentation with atmosphere, Louisie Sue claimed her creativity, especially her lyrical themes, came entirely from her heavy use of hallucinogenic and hard drugs. Compared to other trip-hop and electronica bands of the day, LSD contained more elements of EDM, and eschewed much of the downbeat and jazz elements that were found in groups like Angst Experience. The music set an entirely different mood at concerts, and is now considered one of the fore-runners of Retro-futurism. The band's style has been described anachronistically as "Proto-Retro-Futurism". The choice to not have an actual drummer as a member of the band was also rather unique for LSD. Dave, who described himself as a "self-taught hack" on the drums, said of the choice in 4102, that what the band needed was effectively a metronome, and he believed a computer could do that far more effectively than he could. "I can program the sequencer pretty well, and then we stay on time, no matter what every time." LSD's real influence came in the marrying of light and sound. Performing with stage lights off was a coup, because it allowed fans to focus on the music instead of obsessing over the looks of the band. "If you deprive one sense," Louisie Sue said in 4106, "The others pick up the slack. You always hear more in the dark." Discography Louisie Sue and Dave released three full length LP albums, and collaborated on one EP with Hip Hop artist Fatt Man. LP's *''Torrents'' (4101) *''Black Out'' (4103) *''Fifth/Thirds'' (4107, reissued in 4410) EP's *''Put it On Her'' (recorded in 4105 but shelved, with Hip Hop artist Fatt Mann) Category:Musical artists Category:Electronica